Recently there have been some interesting discussions and posts about the use of incrementing IDs in websites and whether that’s accidental information leakage or not. An excellent article by Phil Sturgeon showed that you can learn a lot about how much a service is being used with just a few minutes of investigation. An incrementing identifier (or ID) is an integer that starts at 1, and is increased by 1 each time a new record is saved to the database. A UUID (or universally-unique identifier), on the other hand, is a 36 character long identifier made up of 32 alphanumeric characters with four hyphens in amongst it. Due to the length of a UUID it is much more difficult to guess UUIDs, let alone figure out how many users have registered on a site.

Note! The code in this article was written for Laravel 5.1 LTS

In the last few months we started working on a new project in the Humaan labs and the discussion of IDs versus UUIDs came up. This particular project was to be written in Laravel, and while Laravel uses auto-incrementing IDs as the unique key for a model, it’s easy enough to switch those out and use UUIDs instead. Having said that, we decided that we wanted to keep the auto-incrementing IDs for internal use but use UUIDs for user-accessible records (and by that I mean records where a URI would need to be generated like /post/uuid-here, for example).

So, I was tasked with implementing UUIDs for models in Laravel which, in itself, isn’t a difficult task. There were a few caveats however:

Not all models will have UUIDs so it can’t be on the base Model class

It must be reusable so adding or removing it from a Model doesn’t involve copying/removing a chunk of code each time

Users must never be able to generate their own UUIDs nor can they override them

However I implement UUIDs there must be a method that allows me to supply an auto-incrementing ID, or a UUID, which will return the requested record

Given that it must be reusable and can’t be on the base Model class in Laravel (and by that I mean the one in app/models, not the actual Eloquent class itself), I decided to go with a trait (truth be told I actually initially went with an abstract class but having to override the parent boot method just didn’t seem right). While there’s no defined place to store traits in Laravel I created a folder in the app/ directory called Traits. The name of our trait is UuidModel so, naturally, the file name is UuidModel.php.

When working with UUIDs in PHP there’s no point trying to roll your own solution to create and validate UUIDs. Time and time again developers have been caught out implementing their own half-baked solutions (hello rot13 or base64 as “hashing” or “encryption“), so we’re going to use a well-known PHP library that will generate the UUIDs for us. Open up your terminal and enter in composer require ramsey/uuid and press enter. Alternatively you can put "ramsey/uuid": "^2.8" in your composer.json file and run composer install. Once that library has installed, we’re ready to go!

Pretty basic so far – just a namespace, use statement, and the trait itself. If you look at the source for the base Eloquent Model class (for reference: Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model) you’ll see there’s a method pretty early on in the piece called bootTraits. This is called by the booter and looks for any traits on the model that have a static method starting in boot. This means that rather than having to do a nasty like this:

protected static function boot()
{ parent::boot();

// our stuff here
}

And perhaps forgetting to call parent::boot(); in a sub class (and thus causing Eloquent to implode) we can safely separate out our boot logic without interfering with the rest of the boot process. On a side note, if there’s one BIG tip I can give anyone working with Laravel it’s to check out the source code. You’ll find so many handy methods that will make your life much easier (and quicker too). Anyway, now that we’ve figured out we can add to the booting process, we’re going to make our booter and then attach some event listeners to the model so we can watch for specific events.

The boot method for the trait must be the same as the trait name with boot prepended. So, UuidModel becomes bootUuidModel, PickleCat becomes bootPickleCat, you get the idea. Check out the method class_basename in the Illuminate\Support\helpers.php file to see what it looks for. As mentioned before, the method must be static so don’t forget that keyword otherwise your booter will never run.

First off, we want to ensure that users can’t be sneaky and assign their own UUIDs (this is assuming your FormRequests, controllers, models, and what not prevent user input from setting the UUID) we’ll need to watch the creating event. This alone is perfect for preventing user input from wiping out your UUID but also saves you having to add another line to each instance where you create a model with UUIDs and generate it. What it doesn’t count for, however, is updates to the model. Thankfully, there’s an event for saving updates to a model so we can bind to that too. Let’s get started, shall we?

As mentioned in the Laravel Eloquent documentation, you can use a Service Provider to listen in on Eloquent events, or you can just use the late static binding static keyword to reference the current class in runtime! Simply put, the line static::creating will be called when that event is fired on the current model.

We’ll use a anonymous function as the creating event callback and supply the current model as a parameter with the name $model. Assign the attribute uuid with our UUID that we generate by calling the uuid4() method, and getting its value as a string (without the toString() method, the UUID is actually an array with 6 values). Pretty simple really. The creating event fires just before the model is persisted to the database, so unless you have a trait that boots after, your assigned UUID won’t be overwritten. If you’re curious on where this event is in the workflow check out the method performInsert on the aforementioned Eloquent model class.

Once again in this boot method we’ll bind to event but this time we’ll bind to the saving event. This one is a little more complete, mainly because we have to verify that the UUID hasn’t been altered in some way (whether that be maliciously, or accidental – although that’d never happen, we both know programmers never make mistakes). Whenever you’re interacting with an Eloquent model, you’ll notice that there’s an attributes property along with an original property. If you were to make a modification to the Eloquent model during the application lifecycle the changed value is stored in the attributes property. Using this information, we can safely check to see if the UUID stored in attributes is identical to the UUID in original.

Using the handy Eloquent method getOriginal, we can obtain the original UUID value and compare it. If the UUID has been changed somehow, revert it back. If the UUID hasn’t changed, we do nothing. This alone will give you UUIDs for a model in Laravel, but what if you want a reliable way to search for a particular model without having to write Query Builder statements every time? Look no further, I have the solution below.

As you may recall, Eloquent models have the fantastic ability that allow you to generate custom Query Builder queries on the model that can be reused time and time again. If you’re not familiar with these “scope” queries take a look at the “Query Scopes” section in the Eloquent documentation. I’ve defined two queries that we can use – one called scopeUuid, which receives and searches for a UUID only, and another query called scopeIdOrUuid, which can take either an ID or a UUID, and find the associated record. In both my scoped queries, I’m going to add an extra parameter so I can either return the model directly or return the Query Builder instance. This is more of a convenience thing rather than anything else – I find I’m usually just fetching a model straight rather than using the Query Builder, but adding it in means I can have the best of both worlds.

On to scopeUuid:

As with our magic booter method, all methods starting with scope are magically called by the Eloquent Query Builder class. Our first parameter is a required one that all scopes must include. It’s the Query Builder query so you can access the Query Builder, and return it to chain queries. Next up in our parameters is the UUID, enough said. Thirdly, the boolean parameter to determine whether we return the found model, or the Query Builder instance. This defaults to true as a convenience – it works well for me but feel free to change or remove it if you find it not to your taste.

First up in our method is a bit of a doozy – first we need to check to see if the supplied UUID is a string and secondly we need to make sure it’s a valid UUID. The is_string (line 14) check, while defeated easily, is necessary to ensure we don’t pass an object, array, etc off to preg_match and cause a fatal runtime error – that ain’t catchable! The regular expression you see above is designed specifically to match UUIDv4 strings. Certain parts of the UUID string start with specific letters so we do a check to make sure that we don’t have a v1 UUID, for example.

If for some reason the above regex doesn’t work for you, use ^[0-9A-Fa-f]{8}-[0-9A-Fa-f]{4}-[0-9A-Fa-f]{4}-[0-9A-Fa-f]{4}-[0-9A-Fa-f]{12}$ instead, which is from the above UUID library. This regex will verify that a string matches any type of UUID, regardless of version.

If either one of the if statement checks fails, we throw a ModelNotFoundException exception so the developer can reliably catch it. Next up, we simply chain a where method call (line 18), which essentially means WHERE uuid = $uuid (Eloquent actually uses parameters with SQL, but this statement is purely an example of what the query would look like – never ever ever send user data blindly into an SQL query).

Lastly, in our little scope that could, we do a check to see if the $first parameter is set to true or false (line 20). If it’s true, return the firstOrFail method that executes the $search query or return the Query Builder instance so we can keep on chaining. There we are! Our scopeUuid method is done, now it’s on to the scopeIdOrUuid method.

This method is rather similar (the only parameter that’s different is $id_or_uuid – pretty self explanatory really) so I’ll just breeze over it quickly. First, we’ll do a check to ensure it’s either a string, or numeric (whether that be 1 or '1' – line 14), and throw ModelNotFoundException if it isn’t. Next, use regular expressions to determine whether the $id_or_uuid variable is an integer or a UUID (line 18). If it doesn’t, throw a ModelNotFoundException exception.

Next up is a nifty feature of the where method in Query Builder. Did you know where can actually be a callback, you can nest WHERE queries in one bigger WHERE query so that you don’t accidentally break your tightly scoped query with a misplaced WHERE. We’ll use an anonymous function for our callback and use the use language construct so that our anonymous function can inherit the $id_or_uuid variable from the parent scope (line 22).

Once again, a final check to see if the developer wants the model (or catch a ModelNotFoundException) or the Query Builder instance returned to them (line 27).

And there we are! Now you can go out and use it! Oh wait, no you can’t. Unless you’ve already generated UUID fields your models won’t be able to store their UUIDs! Whip up a migration using php artisan make:migration _migration_name_here and let’s add UUIDs to the tables. For each table that needs a UUID, add this to your schema:

$table->string('uuid', 36)->unique();

If you’ve installed doctrine/dbal and are using MySQL, you can also append ->after(‘id’) to the above command so it appears after the ID in your SQL table.

To use this handy trait, use it in a model like so:

// app/User.php

use App/Traits/UuidModel;

class User extends Model
{ use UuidModel;
// ...

Simple as that! It’s also recommended that you add the ID to the hidden attributes property so the ID is removed from the array/JSON representation of the model. Add the following to all your models using the UUID trait:

If you didn’t know already, I have run a Last.fm Album Image Generator on my old site for a couple of years now. Recently I started playing with Laravel (Façade controversy ho!) and I’ve really loved it, so I decided to port my image generator over to Laravel, and to open source it.

The album artwork for Last.fm

Using Laravel has allowed me to make the service a lot easier to develop, and also extend. I’m taking advantage of the logging and caching features in Laravel, along with using plenty of other fantastic packages from Packagist. Overall, I’ve found Laravel has a gentle learning curve (unlike ZF2) and is easy to get started with. I started with Code Bright which was a really good read and gave me a very good head start in developing with Laravel. Of course, the Laravel docs were very useful, along with my friend, Dr. Google.

If you go to http://lastfmalbumimagegenerator.com (and don’t pass any variables in the query string) you’ll be directed to the generator where you can enter your Last.fm username then hit Generate! and you’ll be given BBCode to put on your Last.fm profile page. Pretty simple really!

I recently ran into a problem on Media Temple’s grid hosting where I couldn’t get Composer to run any post-install-cmd scripts. I was racking my brains on why it would be failing, it was working on my dev environment OK!

The Composer error in my Terminal.

The problem was that the PHP binary that is at /usr/bin/php via the cli is 5.3.27, which is below my minimum required version of 5.4. Luckily, a much newer version of PHP (5.5.6 at the time of writing, to be precise) is available at /usr/bin/php-latest. The solution was a two pronged approach.

First off, create a bash profile (or edit an existing one) to have an alias to link php to php-latest. You should SSH into your grid server and enter the following commands:

nano ~/.bash_profile

Now, we’ll add the alias:

alias php="/usr/bin/php-latest"

Exit out of nano by pressing ^X (or Control+X), then hit Y to confirm the changes, then press Return to save your changes to the same filename. Finally, type in the command below to make those changes live (otherwise you’d have to log out/in again to see that alias change):

source ~/.bash_profile

You’ll now notice that if you do php -v you’ll be using the PHP 5.5.6 cli binary. Hooray! But, don’t celebrate yet. If you try to run a Composer post-*-cmd script that requires PHP 5.4 (or greater), it’ll fail. Unfortunately, the commands through Composer don’t seem to be able to pick up the bash alias so we’ll have to manually edit the composer.json file to update the binary paths. Once again, jump back to your SSH session (or you could edit it in a text editor):

Before I continue, the composer.json file I’m using is the one for laravel/framework. So, using nano I’m updating each instance of php in the scripts section of the composer.json file, and replacing them with php-latest.